Posted by Brian Petrocelli on Twitch.tv
Chatting, making friends, finding and watching cool streams, even creating your own stream are essential to getting the most out of your Twitch experience. For many of our users who speak a language that doesn’t use the English alphabet, these Twitch fundamentals become exceedingly difficult.
Things are getting a whole lot easier for a big part of our international community today. Users who use Twitch in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean can now add a localized display name with characters from their respective languages in front of the existing username.
We know this doesn’t cover everyone, it’s just where we are starting. We will be rolling out localized display names to other regions in the future.
“But wait Citizen, isn’t this a name change?”
No.
Seriously though, it’s not a name change. This affects display names only.
You’ve always had the ability to alter your display name capitalization in the settings page. The new localized display names appear in addition to the Twitch username. It doesn’t replace it. This will make Twitch search, @mentions, hosting, and moderation accessible to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean speakers.
We built this feature for communities that face huge barriers to enjoying the fundamental Twitch experience that many English speakers take for granted. If you were hoping for a true name change, in the almost-words of Obi Wan, “This isn’t the feature you’re looking for.”
